Contact center software provider Five9 today launched its Spring Release 2018, which includes major enhancements across the portfolio, including Five9 Genius and Engagement Workflow.
Five9 Genius is designed to bring practical artificial intelligence to the contact center and is a core layer within the platform, enabling pervasive intelligence throughout Five9 applications. It includes intelligent routing guided by natural language processing and machine learning and agent guidance.
According to Scott Kolman, Five9's vice president of product marketing, practical artificial intelligence "addresses specific use cases that have direct and immediate benefit" to businesses and their customers.
"Five9 Genius uses unstructured data to derive customer intent. Genius includes business rules, natural language processing, and AI Open Connectors that let the routing strategy and agent guidance use AI investments in other parts of the business. This provides greater understanding of the customer and their needs," he adds.
Designed to get customers to the right agents faster, Engagement Workflow determines who, why, and how, to deliver an optimal experience for every channel. It provides the single, end-to-end workflow that can drive all channels and makes Five9 Genius AI actionable. This enables companies to design the flow of the personalized customer experience.
Engagement Workflow incorporates machine learning technologies from Five9 NLP and third-party AI, such as Salesforce.com Einstein and IBM Watson, to uncover insights from structured and unstructured data, extract customer and call context, sentiment, and emotion; and then match them with the right agent with the right answers. In so doing, Five9 "becomes a single work delivery engine to deliver any kind of work to your customer service and sales representatives in a programmatic and sustainable way," Kolman says.
"This open approach makes it easy for organizations to define optimized customer journeys, using data and insights from a variety of sources to efficiently direct customers to the right resources to address their needs regardless of the channel of interaction," he adds.
Some analysts, though, are most excited about the application of artificial intelligence in the contact center.
"Artificial intelligence is a broad concept that requires investment to apply to specific use cases. Five9 has taken the promise of AI and applied it to contact centers. With Five9 Genius, companies will be able to create personalized experiences, which has been too difficult or too expensive without AI," said Sheila McGee-Smith, principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, in a statement.
Even Five9's CEO, Rowan Trollope, says that such a use of AI is a big deal.
"As customer expectations continue to grow, we believe AI will play a key role in helping deliver a better experience," he said in a statement. "Spring Release 2018 allows us to deliver on the promise of AI and is a major step for Five9, our customers, and the contact center industry."
In addition to Five9 Genius and Engagement Workflow, Five9 Spring Release 2018 also offers enhancements across the portfolio to extend the open platform, a new Supervisor console, and a multi-role performance dashboard.